March 2018

Jul 31, 2009

Jay Rosen returns from his self-imposed blogging exile with some deep-think about the perils of "He said, She said" reporting. Too rich for 140 characters, I guess. UPDATE: Bora is right in the comments -- this is an old post. My news reader pulled it up for some reason -- maybe it, like me, misses Jay's thoughtful long-form work. C'mon, Jay, you've explored and expanded other social media tools -- now come back to the one that's made for you.

Jeff's right -- Jorge Cornell is using the web well in his City Council campaign. I've been begging local candidates for years to do something like that middle column on his front page, and to include more pics of their campaign stops. The idea is to create a community around the campaign by making the site a news outlet and a place people want to visit with some frequency.

Roubini: "Mr. Bernanke deserves to be reappointed. Both the conventional and
unconventional decisions made by this scholar of the Great Depression
prevented the Great Recession of 2008-2009 from turning into the Great
Depression 2.0."

Jul 30, 2009

A couple of localbloggers have declared jihad against real estate developers on the city council and county commission. This comes after a period in which various community groups, often coordinated online, have engaged in some effective push-back against the industry's enormous power. I wrote about this shift more than a year ago, taking care to point out that it's not a simple case of good vs evil. Since then, the industry has been weakened substantially, and the power of the people has increased. How much rollback is enough, and is it possible to go too far in the opposite direction?

Jul 29, 2009

Good to see Carl Wilson's restaurant column is now a blog, too. I get a lot of good info from the print version, and food-blogging has a lot of room to grow in this town. Speaking of which, I took my cousin to Van Loi for a very good lunch today to thank him for turning me on to the Carniceria El Mercadito. I asked him if he'd eaten much Vietnamese food when he was in country with an artillery unit four decades ago; he remembered Army rations in the field, and great French food in Saigon.

A short post about my reasons for supporting national health care (in response to this Long, Long Post, which I found via Instapundit): I'm not an expert on "public choice theory," and I find profiteering corporations to be as scary as other so-called "elites," so I'm reduced to looking at the evidence that public plans in many other countries provide better, cheaper outcomes than our current system -- which itself seems unsustainable -- and that seems offer a pretty compelling argument that we should be figuring out which version of the general idea would work best for us.

Glenn Beck says Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people." A little while later he says, "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people," but then he rallies to say, "This guy is, I believe, a racist."

The fledgling Greensboro company associated with the plan, Scientific and Economic Development, says its mission is "to develop Science Fiction and Education mixed-use projects throughout the world...providing the foundation for long term economic
and urban renewal."

One of the company's founders, Sharon Graeber, is an architect and seems to have been a vice-chair of the Guilford County Democratic Party, although she is not currently listed on its website. The other founder, Robert S. Chiles Sr., appears to have been in the real estate business.

A&T could use some money from the state, but this bill -- which would not even fund the proposed building, just land acquisition and a feasibility study and master plan -- seems worth of a photon torpedo.

This deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced.
Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to
regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice
theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly
so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his
waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply.

One of the good things about the internet is that someone is likely to come along and say much more intelligently something you have tried to say yourself.

Social class and the Gates story: "A lot of the debate about the incident dances around the topic but
misses the big picture—race and class are always factors because we are
human beings colored by experiences and classification within this
country’s historical framework of those two elements."

Reader PA emails to say it was unfair of me to write "I have no reason to believe..." that a couple of local bloggers are "racist on a personal level," because that formulation "implies that you do have reason to believe that are racists on some other level (perhaps professional or political)," and also because I linked approvingly to a Jon Stewart clip that mocks the very same wording when used by a silly Birther.

To be clear, I meant my words literally. I know both men a bit, having worked with Sam on a couple of projects, taught Joe in a blogging class, and read their stuff for years. I have no reason to suppose either one is a racist.

But that gets to the conundrum I tried to address in the post, which is public speech that strikes me as tone-deaf on race. That's what I'm trying to understand, and that's why I tried to differentiate between the personal and (as PA puts it) the professional or political.

This is a huge issue for the GOP these days, as the Sotomayor hearings showed yet again.

"They have consistently overestimated revenues. Period," Sanz said. "The budgets they always prepared were overly optimistic,
and then they matched their expenses to the optimistic budget… I blame
it on just lack of good budgeting. It's pretty sad."

A poor public-relations strategy has not helped Greensboro College through its crisis, says Inside Higher Ed (thnx to alert reader mc for the link).

I was raised in the South and I tend to Ma'am and Sir people and generally to be polite and respectful to folks I encounter doing their jobs. Cops might get a little extra respect, because they do work on our behalf that is often hard and sometimes dangerous, and, let's face it, they can make your life difficult if they choose.

I don't know the facts, but I don't find it hard to believe in theory that a celebrity professor at Harvard who just got off a plane from China might act like kind of a dick when confronted in his own home.

And I know that a black man in this country might have a very different relationship with the police than does my comfortable white self, and I can see how a black man might take umbrage and act like kind of a dick over something that would not come close to setting me off, which is not to excuse such behavior but to try to understand it.

And I know cops are people just like the rest of us, and sometimes they must get fed up and say, enough of this crap, buddy, you're coming with me, whether they really should do so or not.

But here's the thing that's surprised me as I've done an unscientific and statistically-invalid survey of opinions about dealing with cops: the number of people who accept without question that it's OK for a police officer to arrest you on your own property for acting like kind of a dick. Not acting in a threatening way, or failing to comply with an investigation or something, just being kind of a mouthy jerk.

I'm not talking about the legal right to arrest, but the okayness of it in some broader sense. Americans just don't seem to be as libertarian as I expected them to be on this subject.

Jul 24, 2009

Church World Service has opened offices in Greensboro and Durham. You can stop by the Greensboro office at 620 South Elm St., Suite 315, this afternoon from 4-6 for food and information on the group's work in settling immigrants and refugees.

So I'm collecting photos of abandoned or unfinished housing developments and McMansions in the greater Guilford County region. Brian Clarey was good enough to send along several photos of a stunted project in Rural Hall, taken for this article by Gus Lubin, which ran in Yes! Weekly earlier this year. Photo credit: Gus Lubin/Yes! Weekly. More after the jump. Related: The Last Development.

Jul 23, 2009

Protesters motivated by MoveOn.org and their rivals met again today at Kay Hagan's office in Greensboro. Security officers at the building in the Green Valley Road office park ended up asking people to leave, and apparently told them they could no longer park in the building lot -- meaning they would need to take a very long walk to reach their Senator's local digs. The MoveOn group seems to have been the proximate cause of complaints from other tenants, who were probably already agitated by a previous encounter, during which the anti-reform protesters made a racket with a boombox and a motorcycle.

Sounds to me like Hagan, who seems genuinely interested in constituent access -- her staff met today in the office with a group of anti-reform protesters -- may be in the wrong building.

UPDATE: Vernon Robinson, the former Winston-Salem city councilman and erstwhile GOP candidate for the US House of Representatives, offers a first-person account of events after the jump. His version is substantially the same as the story I got from a Hagan staffer, which, along with an earlier phone call from Vernon, informed my original post, although the Hagan staffer cited the MoveOn group, not Vernon's cohorts, as the primary cause of the problem.

The United States Military Academy did not seem to think Walter Cronkite stabbed the United States in the back -- in fact, he was given the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1997. You can read his remarks here, and some quotes below. Thnx to DW for the link.

[T]he Army’s own study established that it was NOT the media
that forced our withdrawal from Vietnam...

...It seems to me that if our citizens
are willing to send the nation's young people into combat, they have
both the right and the duty to share as nearly as they can what those
young people will face...

...How
many pillars there are on which democracy rests might be debatable, but
we know there are two: Our defensive military forces, and our free
press...The free
press serves the unquestioned right of a democratic people to know what
their government is doing in their name.

Jul 22, 2009

Why wouldn't you be happy about the impending opening of Greensboro's Civil Rights Museum? Because you don't think the Civil Rights movement, and GSO's role in it, are worthy of the recognition? Because you like empty buildings downtown? (I'd have asked these questions in a comment at PP, but there were too many registration hoops required.)

I know Sam Hieb a little, and I have no reason to believe he's any sort of racist on a personal level. Ditto Joe Guarino. But the sneering tone in posts like Sam's, and this one of Joe's, seems calculated. I just can't quite figure out the purpose.

"The goal of Camel Milk USA
is to make camel milk available to citizens of the United States and to
further
medical research and studies of camel milk in this country." A North Carolina entrepreneur's unlikely dream.

Thanks to Fec for his research on financialization. Questions for further study: How do we reinvigorate the "real" economy without lapsing into protectionism and ceding financial-industry leadership to other countries? And as I've asked before, what replaces the financial bloat (which some say is much higher than just a few % points) in GDP?

Jul 21, 2009

Special credit to the NY Post for accompanying the web version of its outraged article about the peephole video of Erin Andrews with a slideshow made up of three stills from the movie, the better to impress advertisers with its page-view count.

What does a Want Ad for a newspaper job look like these days? "The News & Record's Interactive department has an immediate full-time opening for a Senior Drupal Developer to design and implement Web solutions."